Managing contracts can be challenging for contract managers and legal teams. As contracts grow in volume and complexity, handling them becomes more difficult.
The consequences?
Missed obligations, overseen renewals, high TAT, and always-rising compliance and risk issues.
Wondering how to improve contract management and make contracting simple and efficient? Here are 8 proven tips and best practices:
- Standardize contracts through templates
- Store contracts in a centralized, secure location
- Set up obligations and renewals for auto-reminder
- Use a contract management system for automation
- Establish clear, achievable KPIs
- Use contract data for decision-making
- Implement electronic signatures for signing
- Identify and eliminate bottlenecks with analytics
In this blog, we will explore each of these tips in detail and how each approach contributes to CLM efficiency. Let’s get started.
Enhance your contract management efficiency with AI
HyperStart CLM helps automate mundane contracting tasks, giving you more time to focus on value generation and less time managing contracts.
1. Standardize contracts through templates
Drafting each contract from scratch is not only time-consuming but also prone to human errors and oversights. Contract writers are likely to miss out on essential clauses when generating high volumes of contracts, leading to expensive and risky legal loopholes.
Standardized contract templates with approved legal language and verified clauses solve this challenge. These ready-to-use templates replace from-scratch drafting while using approved language ensures legal safety. This helps speed up contract generation while ensuring stakeholder interests are met.
2. Store contracts in a centralized, secure location
Scattered contract storage makes it hard to retrieve contracts when required. When legal documents are stored at multiple locations, business teams lose visibility over contracts and spend excessive time trying to retrieve information.
Centralized contract storage helps make contracts more visible and easily retrievable. When all contracts are stored centrally, teams like legal, sales, HR, procurement, and operations can locate, analyze, and track contracts when needed. Additionally, implementing access control helps secure contracts and safeguards them from unauthorized access.
3. Set up obligations and renewals for auto-reminder
Missed obligations are one of the major challenges in contract management. At the same time, tracking contractual obligations across multiple contracts is difficult for teams like finance, legal, and compliance due to the complexity and high volumes of contracts.
Utilizing automated alerts for obligation tracking and renewal management helps you stay on top of contractual commitments. You can use any generic reminder tool or even a specialized contract reminder solution to auto-track contract renewals without manual effort. This helps ensure no obligation goes unnoticed—reducing the chances of contract breaches.
4. Use AI-based tools for contracting automation
Contract management can be repetitive. Activities like drafting, reviewing, tracking, and analyzing contracts take up valuable legal time. This leads to inefficiencies in the CLM process and increases TAT.
AI-powered contract management software like HyperStart CLM helps automate repetitive contract management tasks like contract creation, legal review, negotiation, obligation tracking, and contract compliance management. This helps speed up contract TAT and reduce contract administration time.
One of HyperStart’s clients in the Consumer Goods industry streamlined its contract workflows using HyperStart CLM. Implementing AI-based automation reduced contract turnaround time by 90% and eliminated manual tracking errors.
5. Establish clear, achievable KPIs
Most organizations lack parameters for measuring contractual success. Without defined performance metrics, your contract management processes will likely go in the wrong direction, leading to missed obligations and inefficiencies.
Establishing clear and achievable contract management KPIs can set the right benchmark for CLM performance in your organization. These KPIs can range from ideal contract turnaround time to faster reviews, less time to sign, or improved risk management. This ultimately helps improve your organization’s contractual performance.
6. Use contract data for decision-making
Many organizations make contract-related decisions based on intuition rather than data. This can lead to settling for less favorable contract terms, missed cost-saving opportunities, and increased regulatory compliance risks.
Organizations can extract contract data from previous agreements and use this data for decision-making. This data helps to understand trends and identify patterns. Some of the most common uses of contract data are in contract negotiation, where legal teams use previous contracts to secure better terms and financial value and improve favorability.
7. Implement electronic signatures for signing
Traditional contract signing methods, such as physical or wet-ink signatures, slow down the contract lifecycle, increase manual effort, and are inefficient overall. Additionally, wet-ink signatures aren’t the most secure and reliable way of signing contracts.
Electronic signatures make the job easy by offering convenient, secure methods to sign contracts. With eSignatures and digital signatures, business teams can collect consent to contracts anytime, anywhere. Not just this, the security and legal recognition of eSignatures make them a highly effective way of signing contracts.
8. Identify and eliminate bottlenecks with analytics
Many contract workflows suffer from bottlenecks, such as prolonged approval cycles, inefficient collaboration, and lack of transparency. Without visibility into these inefficiencies, organizations struggle to address the root causes of delays.
Analytics helps identify and eliminate CLM bottlenecks, improving contracting efficiency and team productivity. It also helps identify the most underperforming areas of the contract lifecycle—be it high signature times or lengthy creations—enabling better, efficient contracting.
Secure, scalable, and smart contract management
Enhance collaboration, minimize risk, and speed up approvals with HyperStart CLM. Discover how it can transform your contract workflow.
Streamline contract lifecycle management with HyperStart CLM
Effective contract management is essential for improving business efficiency. Yet manual and repetitive contracting tasks often drain valuable legal time, leading to delays, compliance risks, and operational inefficiencies.
HyperStart CLM streamlines contracting by centralizing and automating every stage of the process on a single AI-powered contract management software. Whether it’s contract creation, legal review, negotiation, approval, storage, analysis, or tracking, HyperStart CLM empowers teams—legal, HR, sales, procurement, and finance—to work faster and smarter.
With HyperStart CLM, you can:
- Accelerate contract workflows by up to 80%
- Reduce risks and compliance
- Enhance collaboration across legal, HR, sales, and procurement
Ready to transform your contract management processes? Book a demo today and experience HyperStart CLM in action.
